Many things about our bodies would not seem to us so filthy and obscene if we did not have the idea of nobility in our heads.

Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.

We can see nothing whatever of the soul unless it is visible in the expression of the countenance; one might call the faces at a large assembly of people a history of the human soul written in a kind of Chinese ideograms.

A handful of soldiers is always better than a mouthful of arguments.

The most successful tempters and thus the most dangerous are the deluded deluders.

Erudition can produce foliage without bearing fruit.

If it is permissible to write plays that are not intended to be seen, I should like to see who can prevent me from writing a book no one can read.

One might call habit a moral friction: something that prevents the mind from gliding over things but connects it with them and makes it hard for it to free itself from them.

Cultivate that kind of knowledge which enables us to discover for ourselves in case of need that which others have to read or be told of.

There is no more important rule of conduct in the world than this: attach yourself as much as you can to people who are abler than you and yet not so very different that you cannot understand them.

People often become scholars for the same reason they become soldiers: simply because they are unfit for any other station. Their right hand has to earn them a livelihood; one might say they lie down like bears in winter and seek sustenance from their paws.

Do we write books so that they shall merely be read? Don't we also write them for employment in the household? For one that is read from start to finish, thousands are leafed through, other thousands lie motionless, others are jammed against mouseholes, thrown at rats, others are stood on, sat on, drummed on, have gingerbread baked on them or are used to light pipes.

People nowadays have such high hopes of America and the political conditions obtaining there that one might say the desires, at least the secret desires, of all enlightened Europeans are deflected to the west, like our magnetic needles.

The journalists have constructed for themselves a little wooden chapel, which they also call the Temple of Fame, in which they put up and take down portraits all day long and make such a hammering you can't hear yourself speak.

Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.

Every man has his moral backside which he refrains from showing unless he has to and keeps covered as long as possible with the trousers of decorum.

Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?

What is the good of drawing conclusions from experience? I don't deny we sometimes draw the right conclusions, but don't we just as often draw the wrong ones?

Even truth needs to be clad in new garments if it is to appeal to a new age.

The most heated defenders of a science, who cannot endure the slightest sneer at it, are commonly those who have not made very much progress in it and are secretly aware of this defect.

It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people's attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation, namely an imitation of its opposite.

If we make a couple of discoveries here and there we need not believe things will go on like this for ever.... Just as we hit water when we dig in the earth, so we discover the incomprehensible sooner or later.

If an angel were ever to tell us anything of his philosophy I believe many propositions would sound like 2 times 2 equals 13.

Good taste is either that which agrees with my taste or that which subjects itself to the rule of reason. From this we can see how useful it is to employ reason in seeking out the laws of taste.

It is almost impossible to bear the torch of truth through a crowd without singeing somebody's beard. G 4 Variant translations: It is almost impossible to carry the torch of wisdom through a crowd without singeing someone's beard. It is virtually impossible to carry the torch of truth through a crowd, without singeing someone's beard

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

I am convinced we do not only love ourselves in others but hate ourselves in others too.

There are two ways of extending life: firstly by moving the two points "born" and "died" farther away from one another... The other method is to go more slowly and leave the two points wherever God wills they should be, and this method is for the philosophers.

Be wary of passing the judgment: obscure. To find something obscure poses no difficulty: elephants and poodles find many things obscure.

Much reading has brought upon us a learned barbarism.

Once the good man was dead, one wore his hat and another his sword as he had worn them, a third had himself barbered as he had, a fourth walked as he did, but the honest man that he was - nobody any longer wanted to be that.

If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.

Food probably has a very great influence on the condition of men. Wine exercises a more visible influence, food does it more slowly but perhaps just as surely. Who knows if a well-prepared soup was not responsible for the pneumatic pump or a poor one for a war?

We are obliged to regard many of our original minds as crazy - at least until we have become as clever as they are.

There exists a species of transcendental ventriloquism by means of which men can be made to believe that something said on earth comes from Heaven.

We often have need of a profound philosophy to restore to our feelings their original state of innocence, to find our way out of the rubble of things alien to us, to begin to feel for ourselves and to speak ourselves, and I might almost say to exist ourselves. Even if my philosophy does not extend to discovering anything new, it does nevertheless possess the courage to regard as questionable what has long been thought true.

With a pen in my hand I have successfully stormed bulwarks from which others armed with sword and excommunication have been repulsed.

What is called an acute knowledge of human nature is mostly nothing but the observer's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

All mathematical laws which we find in Nature are always suspect to me, in spite of their beauty. They give me no pleasure. They are merely auxiliaries. At close range it is all not true.

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

A clever child brought up with a foolish one can itself become foolish. Man is so perfectable and corruptible he can become a fool through good sense.

I have written a good number of drafts and small reflections. They are not waiting for the last touch but for the sunlight to wake them up.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it an apostle is hardly likely to look out. We have no words for speaking of wisdom to the stupid. He who understands the wise is wise already.

Affectation is a very good word when someone does not wish to confess to what he would none the less like to believe of himself.

The pleasures of the imagination are as it were only drawings and models which are played with by poor people who cannot afford the real thing.

If you are going to build something in the air it is always better to build castles than houses of cards.

It is we who are the measure of what is strange and miraculous: if we sought a universal measure the strange and miraculous would not occur and all things would be equal.

Body and soul: a horse harnessed beside an ox.

Just as the performance of the vilest and most wicked deeds requires spirit and talent, so even the greatest demand a certain insensitivity which under other circumstances we would call stupidity.